Victorians! discussion

Please post anything that would help in the setting, time, and character development of the novel.

Renee has kindly agreed to lead the discussion of Jude the Obscure. Thank you Renee!

http://www.victorianweb.org/victorian...

Here is the Victorian Web location focusing on Hardy. Many branches from here, including other WWWeb resources (e.g., 10 pages of thumbnails, many in Wessex).

I'd also suggest not missing the setting pictures here:
http://www.victorianweb.org/victorian...

"Thomas Hardy wrote that he found inspiration for the eponymous Jude the Obscure in Marius the Epicurean."

http://www.victorianweb.org/victorian...

Not an allusion I understand.

"Critical literature about Thomas Hardy’s fiction is diverse and vast in extent, and it has been changing gradually in emphasis and evaluation. It becomes apparent that every generation of critics sees something different in Hardy’s writing. This article surveys only some of the immense number of publications devoted to Hardy’s work." [Bold added.]

More here: http://www.victorianweb.org/victorian...

Have only skimmed, but will definitely return to these paragraphs, roughly chronological.

I think it may be useful to remind ourselves that Hardy grew up in the region he wrote about so lovingly. He knew it and its people well.

If you have read Jude before or completed it recently, you may enjoy perusing this poem. Otherwise, you may prefer waiting at least until it is mentioned in the text. (Hope this is not a spoiler to someone who perhaps happens to know the poem extremely well, but not Jude.)

I can't get the text of the entire poem to load tonight, but you may have better success with Google and some link I haven't found yet.

from Epipsychidion By Percy Bysshe Shelley

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/...

Everyman wrote: "I think it may be useful to remind ourselves that Hardy grew up in the region he wrote about so lovingly. He knew it and its people well."

I love that statement, particularly the first sentence, quite agreeing with it, and struggling mightily to figure out how it applies, or even does it, to Jude.

A modern look at college struggles:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/08/opi...

Lily wrote: Everyman wrote: "I think it may be useful to remind ourselves that Hardy grew up in the region he wrote about so lovingly. He knew it and its people well."

I love that statement, particularly the first sentence, quite agreeing with it, and struggling mightily to figure out how it applies, or even does it, to Jude. "

The landscape, your implication is right, doesn't play as big a role in Jude (at least not yet) as it does in some of his other works (The Woodlanders, Return of the Native, several others), but I think his grasp of the people is very much on point.

Everyman wrote: " but I think his grasp of the people is very much on point. ..."

Agreed. My innuendo applied to "wrote about it so lovingly."

This is a continuation of discussion of the process of writing Jude, as described by excerpts from Claire Tomalin's biography.

"For him it was not so much a matter of replacing Mrs. Henniker as adding another name to his pantheon. He needed a muse, the position Emma had once filled but did so no longer. Ideally his muse should also be his mistress -- as Mary Godwin became Shelley's -- and there is no doubt he longed to take hold of a woman and make her his own in defiance of the rules of the Church and conventional society. But Mrs. Henniker had taught him a lesson by her cool, definite withdrawal from anything more than flirtation, and he had to settle for admiring beautiful women, taking his inspiration from them, accepting their flattery when offered without considering its motives too closely, helping them where he could, and taking pleasure in being with them, talking with them and, if he was lucky, getting a hand to hold. He was now fifty-five years old. When he looked at himself he was dismayed by what he saw: his hair receding and thinning, and hi skin showing the creases of age. Yet his eyes remained bright and he still aspired to a youthful look, ...." (p252)

Is any of this relevant to the development of Jude, the book?

Be careful of spoilers in this post if you are sensitive on the subject.

Pages 254-261 describe the novel and the critical reaction to it, but they do not really deal with how Hardy continued to write and develop his plot. I believe I saw somewhere else information on how/when he added some key plot elements near the end. I'll try and find that and come back and post, but it may be a few days -- this weekend has some other demands.

These do speak a bit to development: p254 "Reading Jude is like being hit in the face over and over again. I think Hardy intended this, although he expressed surprise at his earliest critics....."

A change from the original manuscript: pp254-5(view spoiler)["Jude's great-aunt has warned him from the first against marriage, saying the family history showed the Fawleys were not meant for it. He learns that his own mother committed suicide after separating from his father, and he makes an early unsuccessful attempt at suicide himself. On top of this Hardy piles bad luck, malign coincidence and then horror, when Jude's son hangs his little half-brother and sister and then himself. That he [Hardy] intended the horror to hit his readers hard is plain from the manuscript, where there was originally only one younger child to be killed; a second child was added at a later stage. This is a clear instance of Hardy 'coercing his plots' and piling on the agony...." (hide spoiler)]

"....It speaks sense about the painful difficulties of life for the poor and intellectually aspiring who have lost their roots in any place and their faith in any god. When Ruskin College was founded in Oxford for working men some years later, people wrote to Hardy saying it should be called after Jude, something he was rightly proud of...." p255 Ibid.

About how the final story may have come to Hardy:
Pp257-8 (view spoiler)["...he sent another letter to Gosse, thanking him for a review, regretting that Jude was not a good as it had been in his mind, and also suggesting that he had allowed it to take its own course: 'It required an artist to see that the plot is almost geometrically constructed -- I ought not to say constructed, for, beyond a certain point, the characters necessitated it, and I simply let it come.' 'I simply let it come' suggests that it was dreamt as much as it was planned, and that he allowed Jude and Sue to take over the book and make their own fates If, as this implies, he either wrote with no advance plan, or jettisoned his plan when he felt his characters taking charge, it would also help to explain some of the horrors. Many writers have said their characters take charge or take over the narrative It may be objected that they are his inventions, the children of his brain, carrying out its wishes. But what if they are carrying out wishes he has not consciously formulated? A writer deeply engaged and absorbed in his work may surprise himself, and this may be what happened as Hardy wrote Jude, and may help to explain its unrelenting power and gloom. If the poetic dramas of the Elizabethan and Jacobean writers come to mind, where horror is part of the fabric, we should remember that Hardy said he aimed to keep his narratives 'as near to poetry in their subject as conditions would allow,' and that he sometimes spoke of his poems coming to him: 'the verses came,' he told Arthur Benson. So perhaps we can believe that the worst parts of Jude and Sue's story also came partly unbidden, out of the place inside him where the wounds made by grief and loss and humiliation and failure had never ceased to ache.'

"Hardy made the standard novelists' denial that there was anything autobiographical in the book...."
(hide spoiler)]

Has Tomalin overstepped in her descriptions or has she so completely absorbed her subject that she earned the right to speak thusly?

Lily wrote: "About how the final story may have come to Hardy:
Pp257-8 "...he sent another letter to Gosse, thanking him for a review, regretting that Jude was not a good as it had been in his mind, and also s..."

Lily

Thank you very much for the patience, insight and knowledge you gave my question about Hardy. I feel that I am on more solid ground now. You pose a very interesting question about the point where biographers may overstep their descriptions. A strict presentation of factual material, letters and such is certainly necessary when discussing an author's life, and yet this approach, while accurate and correct, will lack colour, nuance and personal intellectual insight. For me, I want the colour, but only if I am convinced that the biographer is speaking from an objective base. Let's face it, if a biography was just a litany of facts few of us would probably complete the reading of it.

I have not read any Hardy biographies, but have read several on Dickens. I think Tomalin and even Ackroyd push the speculative boundries a bit too much for my liking concerning Dickens, yet both are scholars I respect very much. I plan to read the Tomalin Hardy because of your introduction.

Again, thank you for your insight and time.

Peter

*Adds Tomalin's biography of Hardy to basket at Amazon.* :)

Resources, biographical:

Thomas Hardy by Claire Tomalin. 2006.

Guardian review: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2006...

Thomas Hardy: The Guarded Life by Ralph Pite. 2007, Yale University Press.

Guardian review: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2006...

NYT review: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/18/boo...

Excerpt on Sue Bridehead: (view spoiler)["Sue was one of Hardy's most sensitively imagined characters. Her contradictions, scruples, self-deceptions and impulsive acts of kindness, her charm and stubbornness, her unselfconscious egotism: all these appear in the book with extraordinary naturalness. Nothing in the portrait seems forced or contrived, even though the book in other respects is deliberately artificial -- its structure is geometrically symmetrical, its plot has a fatalistic circularity, and its events parallel myth and tragedy, the Bible and the classics. Amidst all this, however, Sue comes across as unquenchably herself. That contrast creates some of the book's most painful and moving effects. Alongside Jude's tragedy, in words, is Sue's: the story of her vibrant, idiosyncratic nature being gradually snuffed out by relentless external forces, the social and religious structures that surround and come to control her, outwardly and still worse internally, too." pp 352-353, Pite.

"Hardy had shown how Sue Bridehead became 'unreasonable' under the terrible afflictions she suffered -- fanatical, obstinate, and self-destructive." p. 355, Pite. (hide spoiler)]

Excerpt on Arabella: (view spoiler)[ "If Sue looked to Emma [Hardy's wife] like Florence Henniker, her rival, Arabella (Sue's rival) offered her no comfort. The novel does not narrate a return back to first love, not in anything but a hurtful, parodic way. Arabella's sexual frankness and vulgarity stand, instead, at the opposite extreme from Emma's genteel manners. The book suggests that if women are not like Sue then they are like Arabella. Arabella implies that beneath a veneer of civility women are voracious and controlling. Yet, strangely, the book prefers a lack of civility. It's not unsympathetic to Arabella, though many of its readers are. Arabella's crude desire for Jude (like Alec's behaviour to Tess by comparison with Angel's) has something to be said for it. Unrefined and shamelessly self-centred, she does not torment her husband as Sue had done. Emma was encouraged to see herself as either no better than Arabella or as worse." p353.

Not sure I agree with Pite's assessment, but find it of interest to consider. (hide spoiler)]

Another frequently mentioned:
Thomas Hardy: A Biography by Michael Millgate. 1982.

Lily wrote: "Excerpt on Sue Bridehead: (view spoiler)
"

Lots to think about in that fairly short little extract. Thanks for posting.

Lily wrote: "Not sure I agree with Pite's assessmen [of Arabella], but find it of interest to consider."

I'm actually more in agreement with his assessment of Arabella than of Sue.

But I do agree with him that they form an almost diametrically opposed pair.

Everyman wrote: "I'm actually more in agreement with his assessment of Arabella than of Sue..."

I think I understand where you are coming from. The one on Sue was surprising to me, and I have to think a bit to figure out Pite's justification for what he writes -- and whether I agree. My problem with the assessment of Arabella is the extent to which Hardy was playing the either/or game in depicting womanhood or rather just using extremes so certain attributes and their effects could be more obviously observed. I find it a bit difficult to perceive Emma was so blatantly and deliberately compared to Arabella as Pite seems to claim.

Just finished watching the second disk of the BBC version of Jude the Obscure. It has been several days since I started it. Certainly a fine production that seemed faithful to the spirit of the original, if not always the detail. Jude as a character seems clearer to me after the viewing. Arabella felt a bit different -- the expressions of her manipulations toward own objectives almost softer and more realistic/believable than the text. Sue, on the other hand, feels even more perplexing as a character or representation of a real live person. Richard Phillotson comes across particularly humanely, and I can see that, if one had seen the film before reading the story, that portrayal could impact one's reading. I don't believe that there is very much about Phillotson's original encouragement of Jude towards his dreams.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0066674/

Some old postcards here showing the architecture at Oxford (3-4 scattered among next several scenes).

https://www.flickr.com/photos/strider...

Yes, I'm still playing around with Jude. Finally finished a book of criticism that I can recommend:

Margaret Elvy's Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure: A Critical Study

I continue to be puzzled by the figure of Sue Brideshead. This book both reinforced some of my own observations while bringing to my attention those of others, even as some aspects remain mysterious to me.

I would consult this book again on any future reread of Jude. Like Hardy himself, I believe Ely offers insights I haven't fully plumbed.

She particularly suggests this resource, which I did not pursue: The Sense of Sex: Feminist Perspectives on Hardy by Margaret R. Higonnet